Political Scene: The Past, and the Future, of the Washington Post

On Monday, the Washington Post Company announced that it had agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. The sale is a story that extends beyond the numbers of the deal and even beyond the uncertain direction of the newspaper industry—it has political reach, and, for many people, a personal element, too. “I think his heart is broken,” David Remnick says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, referring to Donald Graham, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Washington Post Company, and one in a long line of members of his family to have run the paper. Remnick continues:

The Grahams knew that the only way to make it with the Post financially was to undermine the thing itself, was to cut and cut and cut. And he couldn’t do it. He’d done it too many times, and he knew in his heart that the paper was less than it was.

The important question now is about where things are going, not where they’ve been. John Cassidy, who joins Remnick and host Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast, says, “I’ve been more interested in the other side of it—what Bezos brings to the party.… I wish the Post all the best, but I’m skeptical about its future.”